Struggling whether to upgrade. Any thoughts welcome

Olof

Hi,

We are a small company (8 NAV users) on Native NAV version 3.7 w/ technical upgrade to 2009 R2. Through the years some custom modifications were made.

We are struggling with some issues:
1. We are 90% happy with our current set-up but have now run into a wall. There seems to be no live-data exchange possible with a webshop. We want our dealers to be able to place orders as well online (B2B). The solutions we have found all start from the NAV SQL version and/or are geared to very large companies with very large budgets. For example, Nav-to-Net and Sana Commerce.
2. We keep hearing that our set-up is very old and we should really update to the latest version. Fine, but last time we asked for a quotation (4 years ago..) the quoted price was around USD 50,000,- which is a lot for such a small company as ours. So we keep putting if off..

Basically, if we could find some easy solution to point 1 then I guess we could avoid point 2 for another few years or so. And at that point perhaps look for another solution then NAV which is perhaps more suitable for a company of our size?

I realize I can't ask for clear cut answers here, but any nuggets of wisdom are more than welcome!

Thanks in advance
Olof

mdPartnerNL

With the classic client you can exchange data between a website and NAV too. It all depends on your requirements. We have customers exchanging data with the classic database so send me a pm.

Olof

Ok I will send you PM

At the same time, I have begun to look at Cloud based NAV as perhaps an easier way to migrate. Anybody have any thoughts on cloud NAV?

Thank you in advance
Olof

mohana_cse06

cloud based NAV is a good option.
Please contact http://gac.nl/

Olof

Thanks for the link, I will look at them

Marije_Brummel

50k sounds expensive for a small company with some modifications.

At Directions Microsoft showed a list of over 25 companies selling NAV in the cloud, not only GAC. You might want to get more than 1 quote.

joshuasung

Do you really need real-time data exchange?
Consider hybrid solution. (Some of them real, but some of them are trigger basis).
I recommend take one step at a time.
Change Native to SQL first.
SQL View helps a lot of data exposure.

Marije_Brummel

I agree with Joshua, you can probably migrate to SQL for a few 100 euro

matttrax

Part of the upgrade would be migrating to SQL anyway and it should relatively cheap compared to the other options. If I had a dollar for every native database I have seen get corrupted in the last few years and the trouble it caused you would do this yesterday.

jglathe

Moving to the SQL database opens up web services for you... even if you keep your classic client setup. 2009R2 is EOLed, though. So, you would need to do the other step (moving to a current NAV version, with the new GUI) soon enough - within three years. Doing this in two steps might be the less disruptive option, but it will cost more over time than biting the bullet once and also use the opportunity to re-assess your business processes. Shame about the NAV pricing, though. It is expensive for a small company. With ForNAV becoming available, the upgrade pain is far less than having to re-do all the critical reports again, at really high cost.

Olof

Gentlemen,
Thank you for your time and valuable suggestions. The initial move to SQL version sounds interesting!
1. I will contact our dealer regarding moving to the SQL version, curious to find out his price for that step.
2. I will also check what then is possible with ´SQL view´
3. If then still necessary, I will then also check a solution called Sana Commerce.

Thanks again!
Olof

tinxit

Hi Olof,

You can consider as an online B2B portal the Magento platform. We have a lot of customers which are using Dynamics NAV and the Magento webshop.

Toddy_Boy

Moving to SQL is easy enough but you may encounter locking problems and "Another user has modified this record" errors. I recall using a partner licence to run a routine to correct Date fields as 3.7 allows invalid dates. Though with 8 users this may not be too painful. Web services then opens up a world of opportunity to pipe data in and out in real time.

If moving to SQL is not an option you can use MSMQ to get data in and out of Navision 3.7, I've seen this done before and it works for sequential data in and out i.e. store data off line in a web shop and process orders in Nav.

Olof

@tinixt and Toddy_Boy,
Thanks for your reply and information. After further study and some external discussions, we decided to forego the option of going to SQL version of NAV2009. Instead we are looking to making the step to NAV 2016 anyways. Other quotations at a much reduced cost allow us to consider that superior option.
Thanks again to everyone for helping to clear our thinking!